What Are You Craving?: A Step-By-Step Guide to Designing the Life You Were Meant to Live.

By Melissa Peace Pumo and Dawn Sheek

What Are You Craving? A Step-by-Step Guide to Designing the Life You Were Meant To Live is a saucy new approach to the process of personal transformation. Life-long friends, Melissa Peace Pumo and Dawn Sheek, combine their passions of life coaching and all things culinary to create a recipe for a life that is delicious and satisfying. What Are You Craving? takes you through the steps of life transformation in the context of planning and cooking the perfect meal from appetizer to dessert. It even has recipes! It is designed as a workbook and also includes a facilitation guide so you can cook up the life you crave and help others do the same. So, grab a fork and dig in!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Mar 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9781504374576

Melissa Peace Pumo

Melissa Peace Pumo Melissa is a certified transformational life coach and teacher at heart. Her personal experience of life transformation led to her passion to teach others that they have the power to create a life they crave. She is president of Peace Consulting Group and Constructive Learning Design, LLC. She also continues to teach through instructional coaching for educators, life coaching, and live events. She connects life coaching support groups around the world through her website www.thelifewecrave.com. She splits her time between her home state of North Carolina and Virginia, where her husband resides. Dawn Sheek Dawn lives in Thomasville North Carolina and is a practicing Family Law Specialist Attorney. She also holds degrees in Psychology and Business Administration. However, her passion is for food and all things culinary. She spends much of her spare time exploring new recipes, improving old recipes and working with individuals and groups teaching them how to plan meals, menus, stock their pantry and sharing with them the ease and excitement of creating a meal they will crave!

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Copyright © 2017 Melissa Peace Pumo and Dawn Sheek.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Print information available on the last page.

ISBN: 978-1-5043-7456-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-7458-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-7457-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017902111

Balboa Press rev. date: 03/10/2017

Contents

Dedications

Prologue

Chapter 1 Who’s Hungry?

Chapter 2 What Are You in the Mood For?

Chapter 3 What’s on the Menu?

Chapter 4 Let’s Go Grocery Shopping

Chapter 5 Prep the Meal

Chapter 6 I Smell Something Burning

Chapter 7 Can I Start You Off With an Appetizer?

Chapter 8 Don’t Skip the Salad

Chapter 9 And What Would You Like on the Side?

Chapter 10 The Main Course

Chapter 11 Save Room for Dessert

Facilitation Guide

Dedications

For Mom who prays for me.

For Matt who listens to my mumbo jumbo and believes in me.

And for Dawn, Jennifer, Crystal, Amber and Mandy – the original Cravers.

Melissa Peace Pumo

To my family who have always believed in me and made me believe in myself every step of the way since my earliest memories.

To Dustin who my world would never be the same without.

To Melissa who encouraged me (ok, made me) take this bold step, encourages and inspires me everyday to be the best version of myself and has always accepted me even when I have not. Thank you for this adventure!

And to those friends, who have shared my life with me and allowed me into theirs, you made this book possible in more ways than I can even mention.

Dawn Sheek

Prologue

We are all hungry. Some of us are even starving…starving emotionally, mentally or spiritually. The question is, How are we feeding ourselves? Discovering your cravings and how to satisfy them is a journey. It is the journey of your life. Using the concepts of intention, vision and practice, you can create the life you crave. So grab a fork…and dig in!

Chapter 1

Who’s Hungry?

We are all hungry. Some of us are even starving, and I don’t mean we can’t wait to stuff ourselves with that next giant pizza. If you are like most of us you are experiencing emotional or spiritual hunger. You feel like something is missing in your life, but you can’t quite figure out where that feeling is coming from or why you have the feeling at all. Therefore, we often feed ourselves the wrong things trying to satisfy our cravings.

We try to fill the holes, but sometimes we miss the mark. Perhaps we are craving a new relationship, but instead of putting ourselves out there and actually talking to a real live human being, we feed that craving with chips and ice cream and end up with a relationship with food and a body that doesn’t serve our highest selves. Or maybe we have a spiritual craving that we try to fill with relationships. We surround ourselves with people all the time and end up with many friends and acquaintances in our lives, but still feel empty and lonely and without a spiritual connection to a higher power.

We also have different cravings at different times in our lives. What are you craving now? Is it a new job, a new relationship, a spiritual connection, a purpose? Maybe it’s Kentucky High Pie (If you’ve never had Kentucky High Pie, you are in for a treat!) Or maybe you don’t even know what it is yet. Many people feel like something is missing in their lives. We are craving something, but can’t quite put our finger on exactly what it is.

This book will help you to discover what’s missing and find a way to satisfy your true cravings to nourish your mind, body and soul - and yes, it will even satisfy your craving for pie!

Start by asking yourself this question, What do I really want my life to look like?

How many times do you ask yourself this question? Once a year when you are making your resolutions, or maybe never? We go through our life trying to accomplish things daily, weekly, or on the five or ten year plan. Take a moment to look closely at the life you’ve created up to this point. Now, think about the life you really want. Do these pictures in your head look similar or does one look like a finger painting done by a three year old and the other a masterpiece by Norman Rockwell? My guess is there are probably some areas that need to be changed or at least spruced up a bit.

Now, here’s a big secret, and yes, you are getting it in the first chapter!

All the power in creating the life we crave lies in what we believe and what we tell ourselves…because ultimately those thoughts become our beliefs, and our beliefs become our reality.

So it is time to ask yourself, what do you believe? What are you telling yourself? All that chatter in your head…is it naughty or nice? Take a look at your life as it is today. How did you get here? Did it just happen to you or did you consciously create it? Here’s a hint: (in a whisper) You created it. Either consciously or unconsciously, but all the choices you have made in the past have brought you to this point in time. So let’s reflect for a moment with a little exercise called Stop, Start, Continue. Looking at your life right now, what would you like to stop? Would you like to stop saying yes to everyone who asks you to do anything - from watching their kids to cutting their grass? Would you like to stop smoking twenty-three cigarettes a day? Would you like to stop telling yourself how much you hate your body? I could go on and on, but you get the idea.

Things I would like to stop:

1.

2.

3.

Now think about what you would like to start. Would you like to begin a new creative hobby like painting or playing music? Would you like to start moving your body more in a fun way? Would you like to learn how to cook healthy delicious meals for your family? What would you like to add to your life right now that would bring joy, health, and love into your life or the lives of others?

Things I would like to start:

1.

2.

3.

And finally, what would you like to continue? Let’s give ourselves some credit here. We are doing something right! Maybe you